Mint favors - update

You may recall that at a month ago I had tried to start growing mint for the wedding favors. That trial of growing mint from seed officially failed, so a few weeks ago I found Thienemans, an adorable nursery in town (seriously, I wish I had a yard to plant all that stuff in!), and bought a 4" pot of Kentucky Colonel mint from them.


The internet and the lady at Thienemans said that rooting mint cuttings is ridiculously easy, so I cut off a little bit and stuck it in a pot of dirt. After about 10 days it looked like this:

Not good.

So it was back to the Internet. The problem is that most gardeners find mint to be a royal nuisance, so when I found a thread on a gardening site asking how to root mint, it was full of sarcastic responses like, "All you have to do is sneeze and mint will root!" Which was why I had been so cavalier with my first cutting.

So instead of searching for "how to root mint" I searched more generally about how to root... anything. And I got some more helpful ideas. Using bits of information I gleaned from various sites, I came up with this plan:

Soak peat pellets (which I have, to start herb seeds with) in rooting hormone or fertilizer (which I have, to fertilize my herb window pots, since I never add new soil to them), then stick the plant cutting in the peat pellet. Cover with a plastic bag or dome (a ziplock bag is fine) to keep the humidity high -- since the cutting doesn't have any roots yet, it doesn't have a way to take in water, so keeping the environment humid will help the cutting survive until it sprouts roots. Let sit for 2-3 weeks in a warm, humid environment, then when you're fairly confident you have roots, you can plant the peat pellet in soil as you normally would. Be sure to use a very sharp knife to take your cuttings (I'm using a brand-new X-acto blade), and you want to cut below a node (you can Google it; but a node is essentially the spot on a stem where new branches divide from).

Which gave us this:

Mint cutting in a peat pellet in a little metal pinch/spice dish from the kitchen, covered with a plastic bag that a cat toy came in.

And four days later, when the first cutting hadn't died and the mother plant was thriving and sprouting lots of new shoots, I cut four more:

If they all continue to do well, I'll plant them in the 3" pots in a couple weeks. I already bought a couple bags of potting soil, 100 3" green plastic pots, and spray paint primer and purple spray paint to paint half of the pots purple. The mother plant is doing well, and continues to send out new shoots:

But it also seems to have brought some bugs from the nursery, which is what ate that hole in that leaf you see there. I've seen some of them; they look like tiny, translucent green grasshoppers. I kill them as I see them, and I also bought some organic bug killer, because I really don't want grasshoppers in the apartment. The organic stuff is cool, it's just oils of all these different plants, like thyme, clove, and sesame, that bugs apparently don't like. Good stuff.

I do think I'll probably buy another mother plant or two, though, because I do need to make 100 of these things, and I don't want to over-prune the one plant I have. If I have a few, I can spread my harvest needs around more.

So: 5 down, and 95 pots and 13 months to go. No idea where I'm going to put these things, or what I'm going to do with them from June-September while I'm gone, but those are problems for another time...

I will admit that as cool as this idea sounds, I am already having visions of my entire crop dying next March suddenly. That's why it's good that this is a relatively cheap experiment (the mint plant was $2.75, the 3" pots were 6 cents each, the spray paint was $3-4, the dirt was $8, and the bug spray was $5).

Grow, little mint plants, grow!

A link!

DIY Bride has listed me as someone who links to them! And now I'm just linking back... and the circle continues...

Well, in case anyone ends up here because of DIY Bride, then Welcome! Please leave a comment!

And I promise there are updates coming.

Jamie's wedding - recap

On April 12 one of my best friends, Jamie, got married in Baltimore. It was a really beautiful wedding, and of course, I took note of all the little details to obsess over myself.

The wedding was at the Renaissance Harborplace at the Baltimore Inner Harbor. The suite where we got ready (and where I got to stay for free -- sweet!) was up high, overlooking the harbor. This was the view from our windows:

Gorgeous!

The night before the wedding, the rehearsal dinner was held at Chiapparelli's (Jamie and Tim had a 16-month engagement, but deciding to have the rehearsal dinner there was one of their first decisions!), and it was delicious. We received our bridesmaids' gifts at dinner, which consisted of a little black insulated lunch bag embroidered with our names (mine was embroidered in purple; I think someone knows what I like!), inside of which was a picture of all the bridesmaids with Jamie at her bachelorette party in March, a gift certificate for manis and pedis the next day, a gorgeous rhinestone necklace to wear with our dresses, and an assortment of things that constituted a wedding day emergency kit, like chapstick, Shout wipes, bandaids, antacids, mints, and mini liquor bottles. Pretty cool.

Three of the four bridesmaids stayed with Jamie in the hotel suite where we would be getting ready the next day (the other lived in town and was post-call, so she opted to sleep in her own bed), and the next day we all piled into a limo to be chauffeured around to all the various appointments. In addition to the bride and four bridesmaids, we were joined by the junior bridesmaid, Jamie's mom, and the wife of the best man. After breakfast in the limo, our first stop was at the nail salon for manis and pedis.

Next up was the hair salon, where Jamie has been going for years. I kind of wish I had that kind of long-term relationship with a hairstylist (unfortunately, my mom doesn't count), not that I get my hair cut that often anyway (hence why it looks long and wild and crazy right now).

Here's Jamie getting the veil put in her hair. She had her hair in a really pretty low chignon-type thing and the short veil complemented it well.

I treated my updo as a wedding hair trial, so asked for half-up/half-down with curls. The stylist asked if I was planning to wear a veil, and in a split-second decision, I decided to wear one. So she apparently made the half-up part of my hair conducive to putting a veil comb in:
What it felt like she was doing was taking alternating strands from the right and left side of my head and sort of pinning them up so they lay horizontally across the crown of my head, then letting the ends fall down in curls. So the horizontal parts made loops... kind of like a shoelace with lots of loops? She curled all the ends more when she was finished. I had a side sweep in the front and some volume at the back/top, although by the time she had finished putting all the bobby pins in, she had killed some of the volume. I think it looks nice, but not particularly amazing, but I'm sure it will look nice under a veil and will certainly serve its purpose of keeping a veil secured. And of course, I did buy a veil when I got back from the wedding as a result. But do I maybe want an updo that's a little more visually exciting on its own? Plenty of time to ponder.

After getting ready, we went down for pictures. By that time, the florist had assembled the chuppah:
Each post of the chuppah had one of these arrangements on it, and there was really pretty up-lighting from the floor. Gorgeous!!!!

This was the view as you entered the ceremony room. Those tall arrangements had the largest calla lilies I've ever seen. They were absolutely stunning. After the ceremony, they were moved into the ballroom to flank the sweetheart table.

We did the girls' pictures in the Harborplace Mall, which is attached to the hotel we were in. The mall is in a 4-story atrium with tons of natural light. It was kind of weird to be taking photos in a mall with actual mall customers walking around, but it was also kind of cool. Everyone was looking at us like we were celebrities or something. Some of the cooler shots we took that I can't wait to see included one where the photographer went down an escalator, then pointed his camera up, and we all lined up on the escalator and he shot as we came down; another set was taken in front of this really gorgeous fountain in the mall lobby; and another set was taken in front of Victoria Secret's, with Jamie looking sexy and all the bridesmaids looking shocked -- except I just cracked up hysterically. The photographer took the guys into the mall as well, and took shots in front of Brooks Brothers and sitting at the shoe shine booth. I can't wait to see the photos.

After photos we had some time to kill before the ketubah signing and we were hungry, so we made the wedding planner that came with the hotel get us McDonald's. I love this picture:

That's Jamie and her sister, the maid of honor, chowing down on nuggets and fries. Mmmm.

At the ketubah signing, I started to cry, but we also at that time discovered that our dresses had pockets, so I was able to stash some tissues for the ceremony (which I needed). Our camera is getting on in years so Eric wasn't able to take any good photos of anyone during the processional, but here's Paula and I being escorted by the groom's brother during the recessional:



I have almost no pictures from the reception, since I was dancing so much and having such a good time, and that's fine, except for the fact that I didn't take a picture of the cake, which was done by Duff of Ace of Cakes! We were taking bridesmaids' pictures when the cake was delivered, which is a shame, because Jamie had been told that Geoff was going to deliver it, and I would love to have talked to him in person. He has such a dry sense of humor, I love it.


One thing I did get a picture of was our table. The tablecloth was white and it had this sheer overlay with that black vine pattern on it. I was very jealous, because as I may or may not have mentioned (possibly not; I can't remember anymore and am too lazy to go back and check), a vine pattern is going to be the theme of our wedding! It can't be that exact pattern anymore (and it probably wouldn't have been anyway), and I want more color (Jamie's wedding was all black and white and very formal), but I still had a pang of "Oh no, I can't use that idea anymore!" before I snapped back into reality.

They had a photo booth at the wedding that served as both the guest book and favor. You went in, had 4 photos taken, and it printed two copies of the set of four. There was an attendant from the photo booth company who cut the two strips apart, put one in the guest book and let you write your message, and gave the other to you as a favor. There were lots of great, silly and cute photos, and tons of great messages as well. A surprising number of people (us included) kissed for the camera, too!

It was a great wedding, and I'm sad it's over, because for the last year wedding events for Jamie have been the only way we've all been able to get together! It's up to my bridesmaids now to plan events for our wedding so we can continue to get together for fun times in the next year...

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And since I never posted about Jamie's bachelorette party, here's a quick update: We met up in Pittsburgh, which is where Jamie lives, and we organized a night at Bar Louie in Station Square. They had an awesome bachelorette party deal where for $20/person we got 2 group appetizers, 2 drinks of our choice, a round of lemon drop shots, a champagne toast, a huge chocolate cake, and beads and bachelorette games and assorted accessories. Plus we were in a private corner of the bar up on a raised platform with curtains we could pull to make it all VIP and exclusive. There were a lot of fun girls there who haven't known Jamie for quite as long and therefore were more willing to make her do embarrassing things (the bridesmaids, on the other hand, were in mortal fear for our lives if we tried to make her do anything too crazy). We had a guy come take off his shirt and flex for us, and a few more came over and sang to her (You've Lost That Loving Feeling, a la Top Gun). Good times. If you're planning a bachelorette party in Pittsburgh, I highly recommend Bar Louie as a starting-off point. Plus we waited for a Restaurant.com sale and got a $75 gift certificate for only $15. We totally should have gotten the $100 gift certificate, but I chickened out and wasn't sure if we would meet the minimum (but of course we did). Anyway, it was a good, good night.

eBay is addictive

I went on eBay the other day to buy a new phone charger because I left mine in Maryland. I ended up watching/stalking about 20 eBay auctions for tiaras/hair combs.

I won a hair comb tonight. Who knows if it will look good, but it was less than $10.


At the last second, I lost out on another auction, for a barrette. Why oh why didn't I just make my maximum bid higher to begin with?


And just now, I bought myself a veil. I stayed up an extra 40 minutes to watch the auction close and bid at the last minute. Only $18, score! Does anyone else see a problem with this pattern of behavior?


And oh yeah, I still haven't bought a phone charger.


Other things that are tempting to buy from eBay:

• Old (unused) 27-cent stamps (perfect for postcards now; damn you, Martha Stewart for that great idea!)
• Cake toppers (thankfully most are trashy or ugly so I'm not too tempted)
• Fabric by the bolt to make my own table runners. Can you say "CRAZY"?
• Pretty, pretty ribbon. Just because.

And he thought he was smart already

A running joke between me and a group of people that includes Eric and his two best men references a habit I have of identifying things (especially Internet articles) as "interesting" and forwarding them on to people. Can I help it if I want to share the interest?

Looks like it's for Eric's own good, whether he likes it or not, haha.

How marriage helps your brain

I will admit that having blogging and using Google Reader have both decreased the number of "interesting" emails I send out; I feel I have gotten the urge to share my interest in dorky things out by simply posting them on the blog or sharing them on Reader. It's quite an urge to try to ignore, let me tell you!

Insomnia

For the first time in my entire third year of medical school, I can't fall asleep. This is so disturbing I might have to call a... doctor?

In any case, I'll take this opportunity to write this post I've had brewing in my head for a day or so.
~~~~~~~~~~~
In case it's been confusing (in my other blog) as to what rotation I'm actually on right now, let me clear things up: I'm just finishing with internal medicine, which I've been on since returning from winter break. Internal medicine is a 12-week rotation, but 2 weeks of that is vacation. My vacation happens to be the last two weeks of the entire rotation, namely, last week and this week. Only instead of taking vacation, I chose to do a Career Exploration Elective, wherein I do a -- you guessed it -- elective to figure out what I want to be when I grow up. So that's why I've been talking about Ob/Gyn recently; I'm shadowing in the REI clinic.

Except they were extra nice to me (or had trouble finding people for me to shadow), and I only had to work 4 half-days last week, and only 2 half-days this week. So I'm kind of still on vacation. And next week, I'm really on vacation -- spring break.

The only problem with all of this pseudo-vacation? I have my internal medicine final this Friday. So this is what my brain has been doing the last week and a half:

Need to study.
Vacation!!
Wedding planning!
Need to study.
Wedding planning!
Need to study.
Wedding planning!
Little bit of actual studying.
More wedding planning!

It's quite frustrating on all fronts. I've probably been more productive at wedding planning, so I figured I might as well show off the fruits of my labor.

Back in September, a Weddingbee blogger wrote about these floral puppies, and I thought a floral puppy in a basket would be an adorable thing for our flower girl to carry:

Last month, Eric bought me some flowers when he came to visit (awww), and when they were finally ready to be thrown out, I salvaged some of the poms and did a little proof-of-concept experiment to see if I could pull this puppy (haha) off on my own:
I stuck the flowers in a pot of dirt and used buttons for the eyes and nose. It's not half-bad, if I do say so myself. Needs to be fleshed out a little, but it definitely looks dog-ish, and I'm sure with a fresh bunch of poms it will turn out great. How exciting! (OK, I actually did this a few weeks ago, so it didn't contribute to my non-studying directly.)

I spent one evening this weekend practicing my penmanship in preparation for the invitations we'll be sending out ONE YEAR FROM NOW (had to point out my craziness there):
When I was little, my mom made me practice my cursive as at-home homework. I had a bunch of those copy books where you would trace the letter a couple times, then there would be blank spaces for you to write your own. She wouldn't let me write my own letters, though, and instead made me trace the pre-printed ones over and over and over again. I used to throw fits about this, saying that the blank spaces were there for me to use, but her reasoning was that there was no sense trying it on your own if you couldn't trace the perfect one perfectly. (This is how Chinese children learn to write characters, by the way. Trace, trace, trace. Because if you mess it up, you create a whole new character.) I've always been a doodler in school, and by the time I got to middle school I doodled three things: hearts (who didn't), flowers (I drew a pretty flower that my friend Kim was jealous of), and the alphabet. I would write out the alphabet over and over and over again (the first sign of me turning into my mother -- ack!). In seventh grade, I changed the way I made my cursive upper-case "F" after an extensive doodling session in civics class (why I remember this, I'm not sure).

In any case, all that practice has paid off, and I get lots of compliments on my penmanship at work. And while a compliment on penmanship in the medical field isn't all THAT exciting, since most doctors have chicken scratch that is absolutely illegible, I won't look that compliment-bearing gift horse in the mouth. So if there's one time in my life that it would be semi-normal for me to show off my pretty penmanship, it's when we send out wedding invitations. So I'm going to buy a calligraphy marker and calligraph my heart out.

Here's a sample invitation with my chosen "hand" (that's actually the term for a handwritten font):
Also not half-bad, huh? Since etiquette apparently frowns on computer-printed envelopes and calligraphers charge an arm and a leg (prices start at $2 per envelope on Etsy), I might as well do it myself if I can, no?


The other thing that's been percolating around in my head recently is growing mint. My initial idea was to grow little pots of mint and use them as our wedding favor. Mint is related to Louisville via mint juleps, and I have a secret crush on the wedding pun "Holly and Eric, mint to be" even though all those puns are super-cheesy. Plus it's super-eco-friendly and not something that's going to gather dust in a drawer. Even if you throw away my pot of mint, it will decompose nicely, and the pot is recyclable. This is my third spring in a row planting herb seeds for my window box (I always have basil and some combination of flat-leaf parsley, oregano, thyme, rosemary, and cilantro), but I have never been able to grow mint. A while back I heard that mint, while notorious for spreading like wildfire once rooted, can be difficult to grow from seed. Nevertheless, I tried again.

My six little peat pellets, 15 days ago.

And here they are today, looking pretty much the same. There's some faint green fuzz on a couple of them, but it might be mold, to tell you the truth.

So all of that led me to the internet. It turns out this grower sells 16 varieties of mint -- I never knew there were so many kinds! Pineapple mint, chocolate mint (reminiscent of an Andes chocolate, they say!), apple mint, and ... Kentucky Colonel mint, perfect for mint juleps! Ding ding ding! We have a winner. So if these seeds don't sprout by the time I get back from spring break, then I'm going to buy myself a pot of KY Col. mint and start rooting cuttings into 100 3" plastic green pots. Good thing I have a year to do this. The only problem I foresee is that mint, being related to catnip, is very pleasing to kitties. Good thing they're spending a good chunk of next year on the east coast, then.

One of the small green pots. It's 3" in diameter and 2.5" high -- in other words, small. Only 5 cents from the local plant store! The brown pot is a 2" diameter biodegradable pot, which is even more eco-friendly, but it's meant for starting seedlings and then being buried in the ground, so I don't think it would last a year of waterings. If I can actually succeed in making 100 favors for a total of $20.00 ($5 for the pots, $5 for the mother mint plant, $10 for assorted other things like a bag of dirt and something to make the pots pretty), that might be a world record. The only thing still nagging at me: should I arrange the mint pots in the center of each table as a big, green, minty centerpiece to be deconstructed as the guests leave, or just leave them as favors on the table and use floral centerpieces? The floral centerpieces would be DIY, FYI.

Next up are my wine corks. Ever since we moved into our apartment, we've been saving our wine (and champagne) corks, for an unknown reason. After we got engaged, I decided we were saving them to use in the wedding somehow. I also have my brother (who has been working part-time at a liquor store for some extra cash) saving corks from the wine tastings they do at his store, and my friends David and Amy saving theirs from the many bottles they drink (not that they're alcoholics). A couple months ago I decided I would make a bulletin board out of them, and pin our escort cards to them. Easy to do, problem solved. It doesn't exactly match the venue, per se -- it's not like we're getting married at a vineyard, but it's not like I care about things like that, either. Anyway, this weekend I saw an even better idea on Style Me Pretty:
It's kind of hard to tell, but the description said, "Upon entering the reception, there was a tray that I had made with old wine corks with little escort cards tucked in it." Ding ding ding! Another winner. This solves the one nagging problem I had with the bulletin board idea: I wasn't sure how, exactly, it was going to be hung up. But there will definitely be a table in the entry area at the reception where a cork tray can go. Another problem solved!

I don't even know how this happened anymore, but I also set up part of our wedding registry over the weekend. Well, I know why I had the idea, but I really don't know how I actually allowed myself to spend so much time on this non-studying project. I had the idea because Etsy's Storque feature is having a Handmade Wedding Series, and one of the posts this weekend was about custom registry websites. Thank goodness! I've been trying to come up with a way to register at stores that don't have registries and this is the perfect solution! I tried out Wist, but while it allows you to make a "web-list" it doesn't have a registry function that indicates if something has been purchased. So I ended up going with MyRegistry.com, and once I had set it up, I just sort of started adding things... and more things... and thus the registry was born. There are so many awesome things out there that just aren't available at Target, Macy's, or Bed Bath and Beyond (or, like most things, they are available for less money on the wonderful internet). But don't worry, we'll be setting up some store registries as well. Because I just can't register for towels without putting my hands on the towels to feel them first. And in case you go snooping, we're not going to un-password protect our online registry quite yet, because it's nowhere near finished... and there's still plenty of time for you to buy us a present, so just have patience, little grasshopper.

Today I spent an embarrassing chunk of time looking through ceremony readings (completely Lauren's fault!), which led, oddly enough, to an idea for my graduation speech next year. Seeing as how graduation speech --> graduation --> medical school --> sort of relates to studying (suuuuuure it does, Holly), I allowed it. I'm quite excited by this speech idea, but as graduation is also a year away, there's no sense in spilling the beans quite yet. Plus there's still this year's graduation to attend, and I want to see what the graduating class president has to say. Last year's speech was horrendously long, and the one before that was nice, but unremarkable. I have high hopes for this year's class president, though.

Well, that's the end of today's session of "How I spent my time not studying." Tune in next time (I promise, there will be a next time) for more!

Children?

It's apparently a tricky issue for some couples, whether to invite children to the wedding. But not for us! I love children (and can't wait for my own -- wait, did I just write that on the internet?), and can't imagine a wedding without them. Plus, it would just seem rude to invite all your family and friends from across the country but not invite their children. Yes, my dear friend Mary from North Carolina (not a real person), I'd love for you and your husband to come, but please leave your 1-year-old at home, would you? WTF? If I got invited to a wedding like that, I wouldn't come. And for my family, weddings are the few chances we have to all get together, so it's a mini-family reunion as well. You'd invite your cousin's kids to a family reunion, right?

The New York Times had a recent article discussing this topic. I haven't interviewed caterers yet, but I can certainly imagine that if your reception dinner was costing $150 a head and your caterer wouldn't provide a kiddie portion/price, I'd be peeved as well. But so far, I've found that every wedding tradition and problem (sometimes the traditions ARE the problems, it seems) has a solution. Kid cries during your ceremony? Consider it good luck!* (I have to credit Weddingbee's Miss Jasmine for that one.) The only time I've balked at the number of children we're having was when I looked at one reception facility that required you to use their alcohol provider (already a no-deal for us) and would only let you have an open bar if fewer than 10% of your guests were under 21. Otherwise, you had to have a consumption bar. Unfortunately, there are a few young adults who will just barely not be 21 come the wedding, so we would have 11-12% of our guests underage, and a consumption bar is going to be much more expensive, with our guests, than an open bar would be. Thank goodness we need to provide our own alcohol so that venue was nixed anyway!

Plus, I have a completely adorable niece-to-be who is going to be a whopping 2-and-a-half years old by the time the wedding comes around, so we have a flower girl! There's another whole line of "controversy" surrounding the appropriate age of a flower girl, as well. Is 2 too young? What is she won't perform? Um, excuse me, she's not a circus monkey. She's a 2-year-old. You bribe her to walk down the aisle, and if she doesn't, no big deal. The day does not depend on the flower girl throwing petals. She'll still look damn cute in her dress no matter what!

And speaking of dresses, here are some adorable Easter dresses I saw at Macy's after the wedding show last weekend. The girls' section was conveniently next to the home store. They would make perfect flower girl dresses, especially since I'm seriously considering not dressing our flower girl up as a mini-bride in all-white.

You can see the rest of the pictures I took here.

If I were just slightly older and didn't feel a nagging need for bridesmaids, and knew a few more small children, I would consider doing what is apparently a growing European trend (according to some magazine I read at some point) and just have a ton of flower girls. How cute would that be! You can dress 7 girls under the age of 10 alike and it's considered adorable, whereas dressing 7 girls age 20-28 alike is just embarrassing.

The only question we have yet to address is how much to accommodate the kiddies? Provide a babysitter? Have a separate kids' table? These are questions that will be answered along the way, I'm sure. All I know for now is that I couldn't imagine a wedding without children, so for us at least, it's not a dilemma at all.

*Did you see the two cat/wedding superstitions? "The prudent bride will feed the cat before leaving for the church. Such an act will ensure her happiness." Um, that should be more like, any prudent cat owner will feed the cat before leaving the house, to ensure her own happiness. And, do you think I can make Moxie or Mojo sneeze the day of? That's a trick I need to work on!

**I do not intend to offend any brides that are anti-children. It's your wedding, you do what you want. This is my wedding, and these are my opinions.